If those are great instances, then it’s good to be directing people there. On the other hand, there are just a ton of other instances (like Discuss.Online, leminalaspace, reddthat - although that one disables downvotes) that are likewise general purpose yet excluded for some reason(s) - that is “unfair” aka unequal treatment.

And more to the point, it’s not “a random Lemmy instance” at all, to only pick from just those 2. Instead it’s more “just come join my instance”… which I genuinely am actually totally fine with, I only am arguing against the usage of language that seems to misleadingly imply that it was instead a more equal distribution of picks among all (suitable by some criteria?) Lemmy instances.

There are SO MANY features that PieFed offers to help new users learn more about the Threadiverse - e.g. the entire set of community rules placed below each and every post that you read from it.

In this case, one thing that helps newbies is to either defederate or otherwise block new users from being exposed to the likes of [email protected], without being informed first about what that place is like. MANY people came here from Reddit, got chewed up by trolls, then quickly noped out and complained bitterly about Lemmy on Reddit, X, Bluesky, etc. Someone who is forewarned can handle that, hence the name “Choose your own adventure”, but if you want an instance to hold your hand for you and protect you from anything bad that might happen, then “Newbie-friendly” ones are more like that than the alternative.

PieFed already provides a HUGE aid to help here, and while Lemmy currently lacks this I believe that a future version is imminent that will help in this regard as well. I am talking about federating mod reports across instances, which will allow mods to remain on their home instance without having to continually check an alt account(s) on the same instance that houses the community. This will increase the pool of available mods for any specific community.

Edit: and this barely begins to scratch the surface of what PieFed offers in this regard. e.g. if someone does not want to see so much Trump or Musk spam, they can use a personal (automated) keyword filter, rather than have to rely upon kids to do all of that work for them. Likewise, users can set personal filters for unpopular content, with more than X downvotes, either to automatically hide it or at least to collapse it, needing an extra button press to see it - I personally have these turned off, but if someone wants them, it is available to them (note how this is different than a mod deciding to ban someone or remove their content: this is a USER decision). Another is the user account reputation indicator, placing an icon next to someone’s username who e.g. consistently receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes - it won’t hide their content, but it is a subtle indicator that helps you realize what you are getting into before you respond (e.g. a sea-lioning situation?)

All of the above literally reduces the amount of effort that a moderator is required to do, in order to make a community a pleasant place to visit.:-) Also, it democratizes the moderation work, placing more power into the hands of users rather than that of centralized authority figures.

True. Fwiw, PieFed offers a number of neat automated moderation tools, like a setting providing a community moderator with the ability to limit voting to only Subscribers, which helps curtail drive-by downvoting from All. But if you mean CSAM type of filtering, that I do not know which software has better tools.

For a single-user instance, I would wholeheartedly recommend PieFed over Lemmy, no questions asked. For a small instance sharing accounts with friends… probably still PieFed there as well, but less confidently than it is always the better choice under all conditions. Also the UI of Lemmy is slightly better for the core features and Lemmy’s search functionality is superb, whereas PieFed’s is practically non-existent by comparison (by design), so especially if someone wants to do a lot of searching on their own instance, I could see using Lemmy for that use case. For everything else, PieFed tends to be more useful.

It’s not “random” though if it is always those two choices. And I also confirm that it is ALWAYS those 2 options - I’ve literally never seen a 3rd option offered that way. It’s highly biased towards those two very tiny instances (of <200 people each)… as in exclusively so. Which could be fine, the issue I have here is in calling that as “random”.

Also, if I were signing up that way, I would want to know the answer to questions such as: (1) are there multiple people on the instance admin team, (2) are they well-funded, since a negative answer to either of those might mean that the server disappears six months from now, which is a major inconvenience.

I can see why the instance picker might not choose to put that into front and center, but like… even with me having been on the Threadiverse since the Rexodus, I personally have no idea as to their answers. In contrast, something like PieFed.zip has an extremely established track record, with a very solid admin team. (To be clear, I am not saying that those other two instances do not, just that I do not know if they do or do not, and I didn’t see an explanation on the instance picker page).

Like this? https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser

I mean… that sounds to me like an entirely valid question ⁉️ - how WOULD we handle such?

PieFed is 25-fold more efficient in its data transfer than Lemmy, fwiw (source: that’s 5-fold less data transferred, despite it being for 5-fold more posts, hence 25-fold more efficiency)

If you were at all serious about that, I highly recommend reading https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed - the differences between those software platforms in terms of installation and maintenance is reportedly quite high, on top of the differences in features offered.

Nope, I still see both of them, very high up in the list too - despite it being sorted by “random”, which would make a kind of sense if it would weight more highly active instances higher, so not true random but with a random component. However, every time I refresh the page both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net consistently appeared in the top 5 instances every single time. So most definitely biased towards them, whatever the underlying reasoning may be.

There was something that removed lemmy.ml long ago, but apparently it is not that one.

I don’t want to send leftists to a conservative cesspit, and conversely I don’t want to send USA centrists to a leftist (“tankie”) version. Neither would feel terribly welcomed in those respective opposite spaces.

Instead, the list should be curated to show only “Newbie-friendly” instances by default, even while allowing those others to appear as opt-in alternatives. Which, surprise surprise, the PieFed instance picker does do exactly that - see one of those at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser.

There is. Someone told me that it recommends lemmy.ml roughly half the time. I tried it personally and it first recommended hexbear.net, so I tried it again and then it recommended lemmy.ml. If I was an American-based centrist Reddit user, being sent to either of those places who literally celebrate and call for my literal and actual irl murder (not joking), I would nope out and never visit the Threadiverse again.

So yes, it is a very bad idea if the goal is to entice people to join from any Western civilization.

This is why we probably should be more careful when we do things that could potentially like, oh I dunno, open up a black hole here on Earth. I mean, it’s not like accidents never happen!! Oh wait… they DO!

J-j-just another few hundred trillion bro, it’s going to be so great, you just gotta trust me bro, I swear!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Wow, that’s a lot of eyes.

The Jews control everything (in Israel)!

NOOOOO

_(yes)

C-suite response:

Nothing will ever be truly perfect, it is rather an arms race where defenders construct barriers while attackers jump those hurdles - often easily but it does act as a barrier and some bad actors simply give up rather than do so.

In this case, PieFed has several relevant options, one being a per-community setting that only counts subscribed members of the community, which has the effect of reducing the impact of drive-by downvoters from All, but obviously won’t stop a coordinated attack vector. The former scenario is real though, so the feature has actual benefits despite not stopping everything bad that could possibly happen, as it does improve the state of things incrementally.

Another such feature is the option to only count votes from “trusted” instances. This allows for finer-grained control so that e.g. you could remain federated with an instance, but not allow them to constantly brigade your content. Obviously someone could make accounts on trusted instances to do so, but the subscriber numbers being so low overall for the entire Threadiverse and for Piefed specifically seems to suggest that if it is happening, it is not a huge deal (yet). And the usual measures still apply, e.g. if an account only ever downvotes without ever posting or commenting, then it is likely a brigade account in (a not very decent) disguise.

Sometimes they will get more sophisticated, like repositing comics that seems an easy way to quickly generate many upvotes for the new account. But these seem to be shut down quickly… somehow, and anyway at that point whatever their intentions ultimately were, at least they were positively contributing to the Threadiverse community in the meantime, haha!